Experiment Check in

Okay, so remember the experiment I mentioned I was going to do with my 3 year old. She is going to learn the words of colors via computer game, and I am teaching her words of numbers via pen and paper. After a month I will test her on both and see which method she learned more from.

One thing I have noticed so far in my experiment is that when I am teaching her these words on paper (well, actually I was using a chalkboard), I can produce feedback. As Sage is trying to match the word four with the number 4, I can tell her that the number four starts with the ‘f’ sound. Now she can narrow down her search to those words starting with the letter f. The computer game does not do this. It is not that a computer game can’t do this; it’s just that the game I choose is pretty cut and dry. Here are the words of some colors, here are the pictures of those colors match the first three correctly and you receive a reward. Match the next three correctly and you receive another reward etc. (Variable reinforcement based on an interval ratio.)
Here's what it looks like:

I think that the feedback component is a rather important one. Sage is going to learn the words of the colors simply by memorization, whereas while she’s learning the words of the numbers, she actually learning how to read. I guess that's the difference between role learning and meaningful learning. Of course what she learns from our time spent learning the words of numbers can be carried over into other activities, probably even the color words, so there is one side effect that could jeopardize the validity of my experiment, but I’m going to follow it through anyhow.

I guess if I would have thought it through a little more at the beginning, I might have chosen a different computer game. However that illustrates that often things do come up along the way that were not accounted for at the beginning. A human can adjust for such change, a computer can’t.

2 points human, 0 points machine.